Anna L. Peterson and Brandt G.

Peterson Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador

a month before his death, oscar romero, archbishop of san Salvador, El Salvador told an interviewer, If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people. . . . May my blood be the seed of freedom and the signal that hope will soon be a reality (Romero, 1987: 461). Romero was shot through the heart as he said Mass, killed on the orders of a Salvadoran military colonel who organized both clandestine death squads and the far-right political party that has ruled the country since 1989. The archbishop became a martyr for Catholics and other believers throughout the world. Romero died in the early days of the conflict between the Salvadoran government and the revolutionary FMLN (the Spanish abbreviation for the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front), a conflict that eventually consumed about 80,000 lives. The vast majority of the dead were civilian victims of the Salvadoran army, whose brutal counterinsurgency war was heavily supported by the United States. Twelve years after the death of the archbishop, as the peace accords that ended the civil war were beginning to go into effect, an enormous banner with an image of Monseor Romero was draped from San Salvadors cathedral: Monseor, you came back to life in the people. These words were intended to mark the end of the violence of

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the war and to inaugurate a period of peace, democracy, and national reconciliation that would honor Romeros mission and his sacrifice. Yet the years since the end of the war have hardly been peaceful. El Salvador has one of the highest homicide rates in the western hemisphere, and violence associated with street crime in particular has emerged as a central preoccupation for many Salvadorans since the wars end. Income inequality and poverty rates remain high, particularly for those in the countryside, where traditional agricultural production has declined precipitously. In the western coffee-growing regions, decimated by the worldwide drop in prices, poverty and hunger have risen to levels unseen in decades. The economic problems and violence contribute to an enormous flow of migrants out of the country, most to the United States via Mexico, but others headed to different parts of Latin America, Canada, Europe, and Australia. In these conditions, we ask in this paper where we might locate Romeros return and, more generally, what is the place of martyrdom, so central to the discursive organization of the civil war, in the present. We trace the themes of martyrdom and sacrifice across two distinct periods of Salvadoran history: the civil war of the 1980s and the postwar era since 1992. As the situation in the Salvadoran civil war shows, themes of martyrdom and sacrifice can help to organize political struggle by providing frames for interpreting social and political landscapes and addressing issues of violence, loss, and mourning. We highlight several distinct functions of martyr narratives in Salvadoran politics since the late 1970s. First, conceptions of martyrdom and sacrifice provide meaningful frames for agency, orienting and motivating individual and collective action as political struggle. Through risk and sacrifice, people are connected to a common good. This connection places individual sacrifices into a context in which they are painful but meaningful as part of a struggle that transcends any particular individual. Notions of martyrdom also position people in relation to history. They situate the present in narratives of past and future and locate people in relation to sacred history, inserting current events into a reli-

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giously and morally meaningful narrative of sacred time. Martyrdom identifies divine power and intentions as acting in human history, at the same time it provides a goal or horizon toward which history is moving: the kingdom of God. For progressive Catholicism, this is given additional resonance by associating Jesus with individual actors, such as Romero and other assassinated priests, and with the collective people (pueblo) that acts out Gods will in history. Because they provide a sense of meaning and context to particular deaths, popular understandings of sacrifice help organize peoples relations with loss and with the dead. Martyrdom narratives locate individual and collective experiences of suffering and injustice within a particular historicity. They anticipate the deaths of those who struggle against unjust power, and so anticipate loss, while simultaneously marking death as something other than loss as such. The martyr remains; death is continuous with the life of the martyr. The martyr is mourned; her loss is felt and suffered, yet she is not let go. This process recalls Freuds investigation of two distinct responses to the loss of a loved one, mourning and melancholia. Mourning in this formulation is the necessary and healthy path, in which loss is recognized and the living move on, eventually releasing their investment in the lost person or object. This contrasts with melancholia, the pathological form of dealing with loss in which the mourner refuses to relinquish her attachment to the dead or the lost, instead incorporating the loss within her ego. Melancholia constitutues a form of mourning without end that leaves the living virtually immobilized (Eng and Kazanjian, 2003; Freud, 1986). The complicated dynamics of martyrdom defy this classic Freudian contrast. In the context of martyrdom as it was elaborated in liberation theology, the living move on, and do so accompanied by the martyred dead. The refusal to relinquish attachment to the dead motivates continued activism as well as the emotional survival of those who remain. Finally, martyrdom is tied to particular conceptions of power. The worldly forces that persecute and kill martyrs are specific, locatable, and identified with structures of sin and injustice. These relationships under-

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line the association of the martyrs and their allies with divine causes and intentions, and help make their struggles and sacrifices meaningful. The theme of martyrdom is most politically and morally resonant, in other words, when people identify unjust power and experience those injustices as the source of their own suffering and oppression. Under other conditions of suffering, however, martyrdom and sacrifice are less persuasive. Specifically, when the powers that kill are dispersed and difficult to identify, both their identification with sinful forces and their victims identification with Gods cause become more tenuous. Since the wars end in El Salvador, although conditions of suffering remain high for many, it is difficult to identify the locations of injustice, the structural sources of inequality and suffering, and even the agents of violence. We understand this dispersion of power as part of more general transformations in practices of governance in much of Latin America. The shift in strategies of domination under conditions of military rule to the operations of power in conditions of formal democracy, although never as neatly distinct as the language of shifts and transitions suggests, parallels a global shift from the centralized power of sovereign rule to decentralized modes of inciting social subjects to govern themselves. Whether seen as part of a long-term historical movement characteristic of late modernity (Foucault, 1978; Rose, 1999), or more narrowly because coups and dictatorships diminish investor confidence (Weyland, 2004), we associate both the new modes of rule and new conditions of suffering with the establishment of neoliberal economic policies beginning in the 1980s and the formal processes of democracy with the peace accords. For the purposes of this paper, the most significant aspects of this shift are the dispersion and decentralization of power, and the concomitant loss of a central, identifiable source of negative power; the deterritorialization of the poor, particularly the agricultural workers who previously grounded, quite literally, the projects of liberation theology and revolution; and the depoliticization of violence, most often understood today as problems of nature, fate, or criminality rather than part and parcel of patterned and structured systems of injustice.

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We find martyrdom in these new conditions to be articulated most typically as a discourse of commemoration, performing a relationship to history very different from that evident during the war. Today, themes of sacrifice emerge most consistently in narratives around migration, stories of individuals sacrificing for family and individual attainment often linked to entrepreneurial goals. In this paper we track the transformation of martyrdom and sacrifice in popular and religious discourse in El Salvador. We dedicate our attention to the meanings and practices of martyrdom and sacrifice during the civil war of the 1980s with an eye toward presenting an account of the conditions of political uncertainty and dispersion facing Salvadorans today.

HISTORICAL ROOTS As in much of Central America, political rule in El Salvador has long
been marked by the use of violence by the state against workers and peasants. In 1833, soon after independence, indigenous people led by Anastasio Aquino attacked Spanish installations in various parts of the country to protest government repression and the tribute demanded by local authorities. When the rebellion failed, the military executed Aquino and displayed his head in a cage. A regular pattern of agricultural booms and busts developed that continued into the twentieth century. At various times, and in different parts of the country, indigo, balsalm, henequin, cotton, and finally coffee production saw periods of very high profitability that were often accompanied by the displacement of subsistence farmers and the concentration of land (Lauria-Santiago, 1999). As Patricia Alvarenga documents, a repressive apparatus was created in the last decades of the nineteenth century alongside changes in labor and property relations and agrarian reform that tended overwhelmingly to benefit larger landholders while forcing many of the poor to rely on sharecropping and day labor as they lost access to land (Alvarenga, 1994). Protests against agrarian reform and dislocation of peasants in the 1880s and 1890s encountered state security institutions increasingly empowered to contain workers.

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In the case of coffee, serious commercial production began to grow in the 1880s and expanded dramatically in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Between 1916 and the early 1930s the amount of land dedicated to coffee increased from 61,000 hectares to 100,000 hectares (Gould and Lauria Santiago, 2008: 6). The loss of subsistence farmland created an itinerant rural population that provided seasonal labor on large estates. By the early 1920s, an elite whose wealth was grounded in agriculture and finance established itself, while the population of rural poor with little or no access to land expanded significantly. The pattern of protest and repression was repeated, in shocking and horrific proportions, in the 1932 massacre known as la matanza. In December 1931, a military junta overthrew recently elected reformist president Arturo Araujo. The next month, about 5,000 mostly indigenous people, organized by the Communist Party, launched an uprising centered in the western provinces of Sonsonate and Ahuachapn. The rebels took over and destroyed several town halls and killed 15 to 20 people, including landlords, national guardsmen, and a retired general. The military government responded by killing not only the insurrections participants and leaders, including Communist Party founder Farabundo Mart, but also huge numbers of people who had not participated in the rebellion. Ten thousand people died at the hands of the government. The matanza has powerfully shaped Salvadoran political culture. The right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Republican Nationalist Alliance, ARENA), founded by army colonel and death squad organizer Roberto DAbuisson, has ruled El Salvador since 1989. Formed most fundamentally by the anticommunism of traditional elites, ARENA begins its national electoral campaigns in Izalco, one of the sites of the most horrific violence of 1932 because, as one ARENA president put it, it is here that we buried communism (Gould, 2001: 138). Economic and government leaders have believed that if necessary, they could repeat the lesson of 1932 (Baloyra, 1982: 31).

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For survivors of the 1932 massacre and their descendants, painful memories of the massacre were confined to private spaces, and to a large extent were silenced or marginalized. Early journalistic and academic accounts of the massacre were oriented toward elite consumption and committed to refining a narrative of the military saving the nation from a cancerous communist menace. There were no spaces in a national public sphere for commemoration or the articulation of counternarratives. For survivors of the massacre and their children, this official repression may have contributed to psychological repression among individuals, families, and communities. Children and grandchildren of the generation decimated by the massacre grew up hearing of the massacre as a lesson not to engage in potentially subversive activities. This directive implicitly assigns responsibility to the victims of the terror, even though the majority killed had not, in fact participated in the uprising or been affiliated with the Communist Party (Surez-Orozco, 1992). Generations of peasants, labor leaders, and opposition intellectuals have understood that repression may return at any moment, regardless of ones political actions. Throughout the twentieth century, explicitly political violence was an ever-present threat for most Salvadorans, especially poor people and activists. In the wake of the 1932 massacre, political opposition in most of El Salvador went underground, and the political spaces opened in the 1920s were effectively shut down (Gould and Lauria-Santiago, 2008). For decades after 1932, la matanza was narrated primarily in accord with the needs of an elite nationalist project. The first booklength accounts, Joaqun Mndezs Los Sucesos Comunistas en El Salvador (1932) and Jorge Schlesingers Revolucin Comunista (1946) were fantastic in the psychoanalytic sense, tales of savage violence and disorder perpetrated by communists and their dupes, threats to the national body (B. Peterson, 2007). Much later, the poet and revolutionary Roque Dalton would re-read the events of 1932 through the lens of heroic revolutionary organization. Daltons Miguel Marmol, presented as the testimonio or

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memoir of one of the Communist Party organizers of the 1932 uprising, positioned the rebellion as a foundational moment in a left-nationalist narrative that set the stage for the revolutionary project of Daltons generation (Dalton, 1987). Notable in both right- and left-wing versions of la matanza is a shared evaluation of the victims as having died having been sacrificedfor a national cause that would continue. For the right, of course, that national cause was order. The right-wing understanding of national order and progress would be constructed against communism as a threat, a disease against which the body politic must be inoculated (Candelario, 2003). For the left, the victims of the massacre were rendered, somewhat abstractly, as el pueblo, the people, the subjects of what in the 1970s and 1980s would be understood as national liberation.1 However, mass death in 1932 was not described in terms of martyrdom, for reasons including the political culture of both left and right during that period and, perhaps most important, the absence of a progressive religious discourse that could link historical events with divine purposes.

RELIGIOUS ROOTS The deaths of Archbishop Romero and thousands of other Christians
killed by the Salvadoran government and death squads gain meaning because of narratives, values, and expectations with deep roots in Christian history. Most important is the story of Jesuss life, death, and resurrection, which provides a lens for making sense of subsequent violence. One of Christianitys distinctive features, as Mexican theologian Carlos Bravo notes, is that it worships a god who dies in apparent defeat (Bravo, 1990). This history resonates with activists who face uphill battles against more powerful enemies. It enables them to view setbacks and painful losses not as evidence that their cause is either unjust or ill-fated but rather that they are on the correct path, following in fact the trajectory of Jesuswho told his disciples to expect difficult times. If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. . . . A servant is not greater than his master. If they perse-

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cuted me, they will persecute you (John 15:18, 20). Worldly success does not correlate with moral righteousness. The sacrifices of early disciples, following the crucifixion of Jesus, reinforced the association between true faith and persecution. Their deaths served as signs of the last days, as witness to the true faith, and, not least, as imitation of the model of self-sacrifice set by Christ himselfimitatio Christi. The value given to sacrifice helped make persecution inevitable and even desirable for early Christians, and even transformed suffering into a mark of true faith. All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus can expect to be persecuted, asserts the second letter of Timothy (3:12); the writer goes on to suggest that in fact believers can attain the kingdom of God only through affliction. During the second and third centuries CE, believers came to understand persecution not as a threat to avoid, but as a sign of the new age, to be accepted with stoicism and even joy. Christian definitions of martyrdom have been expanded at various times and places, including Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. While popular narratives disagreed about some issues, especially whether those who used violence could be termed martyrs, they concurred about several main points. First, martyrs were those on the side of social justice and against the military and powerful classes. This went along with the redefinition of Christianity that took place in much of Latin America following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The council, a meeting of bishops called by Pope John XXIII, produced a wide range of documents addressing internal and external issues, including new, favorable, interpretations of human rights, political democracy, and ecumenism. The council also called for changes in pastoral and liturgical practices and for increased lay participation in the church, which it defined not as the hierarchy but as the people of God (Abbot, 1966). While setting a new tone and emphasis for the global church, Vatican II also encouraged regional and national churches to consider the Councils conclusions in light of their own circumstances.

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Following that suggestion, the Latin American Bishops Council (CELAM) met in 1968 in Medelln, Colombia, to reflect on the church in the present-day transformation of Latin America in the light of the council (CELAM, 1979). The bishops denounced the institutionalized violence of poverty throughout the region and affirmed the churchs commitment to work for the political and economic transformations necessary to achieve the social justice demanded by the Bible and the Catholic tradition. They also called for new pastoral methods, with greater attention to poor neighborhoods and rural villages. This encouraged the growth of comunidades eclesiales de base (grassroots Christian communities, or CEBs) as a more democratic and participatory form of pastoral organization in which laypeople discussed biblical texts in light of their own experiences. Medelln also gave momentum to the emerging theology of liberation, which provided a biblically grounded critique of social injustices and economic inequities in Latin America. The pastoral and theological innovations inspired by Vatican II and Medelln helped shift Latin American Catholicism toward a new emphasis on social justice and popular participation. However, the practical implications of these developments varied in different countries. In El Salvador, the progressive Catholic vision was embraced most fully in the Archdiocese of San Salvador, first under the leadership of Archbishop Luis Chvez y Gonzlez, who served from 1939 to 1977. Chvez had promoted early reforms during the 1950s and early 1960s, and after Vatican II he issued pastoral letters applying the councils goals and concerns to the archdiocese. Because of Chvezs efforts, recalls a Salvadoran diocesan priest, The documents [of Vatican II and Medelln] were like the air that we breathed at this time (Vega, 1990). A group of young priests formed in 1970 to discuss their work within the historical movement forward of the poor in our country, and that same year Chvez organized a National Pastoral Week to discuss and strengthen pastoral innovations (Archdiocese of San Salvador, 1976; Erdozan, 1981).

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Vatican II, Medelln, and local progressive initiatives were crucial to understandings of martyrdom for two reasons. First, a growing commitment to human rights, political democracy, and economic equality brought Christian activists into conflict with political and economic elites, and the military forces that defended them. This meant that for the first time in Latin American history, Catholics became targets of political violence for their work on behalf of the faith. These experiences of repression provided data in need of interpretation by both laypeople and Christian intellectuals. Second, this interpretation was provided by precisely the ideologyprogressive Catholicismthat had helped spark the violence. Progressive Catholicism asserted that true Christianity demands defense of the weak, in imitation of Jesuss ministry. Just as Jesus was persecuted and ultimately killed by the oppressors of his time, so contemporary Christians are at risk of persecution by powerful people who benefit from the unjust and un-Christian social order. And the deaths of these martyrs, like the death of Jesus, contribute to the ultimate realization of the reign of God on earth.

MARTYRDOM AND SACRIFICE IN EL SALVADOR: THE LATE 1970S AND 1980S Following the political crisis of 1931-1932 and the matanza, Salvadoran
politics was characterized by authoritarian rule, in which economic elites determined policies enforced by an obedient military. Resistance was rarely open, and crushed brutally when it erupted. Not until the late 1960s did a new cohort of opposition movements emerged, largely organized by students, peasants, and trade unionists and fueled by economic problems that made life increasingly difficult for the poor majority, especially in the countryside. After blatant electoral frauds in 1972 and 1977, many opposition activists turned away from hopes for peaceful paths to change, and armed revolutionary movements began gathering steam. Support for these organizations grew as the military junta intensified repression. This violence, in turn, pushed even pacific opponents of the regime into alliances with armed revolutionary

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groups, which united in 1980 as the Farabundo Mart Front for National Liberation, or FMLN. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, army units and paramilitary death squads killed, captured, and disappeared thousands of activists, producing well-known images of soldiers machine-gunning unarmed demonstrators, terrified peasants being hauled away by helmeted National Guardsmen, and mutilated cadavers in body dumps. El Salvador in the 1980s, as anthropologist Leigh Binford writes, stood in a metonymic relationship with murdered nuns, headless bodies, and mangled corpses (Binford, 1986: 116). The government attacked civilians in part because they were easier targets than the well-trained and canny fighters of the FMLN, whom the U.S. government recognized as the most effective guerrillas in the hemisphere. Salvadoran government soldiers, many of whom had been forcibly recruited and who valued surviving more than winning the war, often avoided confrontations with the guerrillas. A certain strategic logic also justified attacks on civilians. Salvadoran officials, along with their U.S. sponsors, recognized the lefts strong popular backing. As an analyst for the Commission on U.S.-Latin American Relations wrote in April 1990, Given the armys vast superiority in numbers and firepower, the FMLN could not survivelet alone operate as widely and freely as it doeswithout a substantial civilian base of support (Peltz, 1990: 36). This meant that the only way to eliminate the guerrillasthe fishwould be to drain the sea in which they thrived: their dense network of ideological and logistical support. Repression of civilians and increasing political polarization helped radicalize many Catholic activists, whom the military government increasingly saw as a major threat. Open repression of Catholic activists began in early 1977, with the expulsion of Colombian priest Mario Bernal. In response, Salvadoran Jesuit Rutilio Grande declared: Im afraid that if Jesus of Nazareth came back, coming down from Galilee to Judea, that is from Chalatenango to San Salvador, I daresay he would not get as far as Apopa,

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with his preaching and actions. They would stop him in Guazapa and jail him there. . . . They would accuse him of being a rabble-rouser, a foreign Jew, one confusing people with strange and exotic ideas, against democracy, that is, against the minority. Ideas against God, because they are a clan of Cains. They would undoubtedly crucify him again (quoted in Berryman, 1984: 120-21). By making reference to the story of Jesuss life, Grande linked contemporary activists to the rabble rouser Jesus and the government to Cain. Grande also placed contemporary Salvadoran events into sacred historyGalilee and Judea become Chalatenango (an impoverished rural area in northeastern El Salvador) and San Salvador. The speech raises the theme of crucifixion, but in a speculative way, since the reality of widespread political killings had not yet shaken the opposition. In February 1977, Grandes primary concern was the freedom to criticize, to organize, to tell the truth. Less than a month after he gave the speech quoted earlier, Grande was assassinated, along with an elderly man and young boy who were riding in his jeep when it was ambushed on a country road near his parish of Aguilares. Grandes killing, the first murder of a priest in Salvadoran history, marked a turning point in Salvadoran political discourse. The killing had a special impact on Oscar Romero, a close friend, who had been named archbishop of San Salvador a month earlier. Grandes murder prompted Romero to re-evaluate other acts of political violence and, increasingly, to defend opposition activists as martyrs rather than terrorists. As political violence intensified in the months and years following Grandes murder, martyrdom and sacrifice became prominent themes in opposition political discourse and values. They helped ordinary people make sense of the killings of popular leaders and beloved pastoral agents as part of a larger historical process in which good, and God, would ultimately triumph. These interpretations rested heavily on biblical references, especially the story of Jesuss life and death. One of the most important

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themes was the notion that the true church will always be persecuted. This notion was reinforced by biblical passages such as John 5:20, which Archbishop Romero summarized thus: Jesus Christ said it: If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you (quoted in Brockman, 1989: 32). Laypeople frequently made similar claims, such as a participant in a parish event in 1990 who asserted, If were persecuted like Christ, its because were doing whats right and were not mistaken. Another man argued, similarly, that If the church is alive, there are always problems. If its stagnant, theres peace.2 The widespread belief that political repression was a consequence of correct faith and action encouraged activists to understand their suffering as both a political necessitythe cost of achieving their goalsand as a religious good: participation in Jesuss travails. Contemporary sacrifices paralleled Jesuss also in leading to the same end results. Just as Jesuss death was followed by his resurrection, progressive Catholic activists asserted that their sacrifices would contribute to a rebirth, not in individual bodily terms but in a collective, moral sense. Again, Archbishop Romero crystallized popular understandings. If a Christian has to die to be faithful to his or her only God, he asserted, God will resurrect him or her (La Iglesia en El Salvador, 1982: 68). Romero elaborated this notion in the interview cited earlier: I have frequently been threatened with death. I should tell you that as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people. . . . Martyrdom is a grace that I do not believe I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, may my blood be the seed of freedom and the signal that hope will soon be a reality (Romero, 1987: 461). Salvadoran activists embraced Romeros conviction that sacrifices would contribute to the realization of their hopes for a new society. This

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hope, and other convictions associated with the discourse of martyrdom, were diffused in a variety of ways. One of the most powerful was the eucharist (Lords Supper), which Christians have long understood as a celebration of Jesuss martyrdom and a preparation for their own. If we daily drink the cup of the blood of Christ, wrote Cyprian, it is in order to be ready to shed our blood for Christ as well (quoted in Lesbaupin, 1987: 47). More recently, ritual reenactments of the last supper in Central America have helped deliver the message that sacrifice, suffering, and temporary defeat are inevitable parts of struggles for justice. Another important ritual for the spread of popular understandings of sacrifice is the va crucis, the re-enactment of Jesuss path to the cross. During a va crucis, held in many parishes every Friday during Lent, participants walk a path marked by various stations, each representing a stage in Jesuss passion. Celebrations of the ritual during the 1970s and 1980s often made parallels between Jesuss fate and contemporary political events. (The presence of government soldiers at many of these events reinforced the parallels.) For example, at the first station, where Jesus is condemned to death, one popular va crucis guide asserts that like Jesus, Today many are unjustly condemned to death. . . . Many are accused for telling the truth (Va Crucis, 1990: 5). At the seventh station of the va crucis, when Jesus falls for the second time, the guide provides a clear message for activists: despite losses and defeats, their cause will prevail, in no small part because of their sacrifices [Jesus] doesnt feel defeated, and he doesnt abandon his commitment. Jesus knows that whats wrong isnt falling; the real evil is in not getting up. Even though we fall a thousand times, a thousand times we have to raise ourselves up to follow our commitment to give life and happiness to our brothers and sisters (Va Crucis, 1990: 17). In addition to rituals such as the mass and via crucis, popular understandings of martyrdom were articulated and diffused through

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misas populares, folk songs written to accompany the mass, which were in wide circulation throughout Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. The misas and other popular religious songs, including many written by parishioners in honor of murdered priests or layworkers, powerfully conveyed central images and values of the political opposition. A song for Father Alirio Macas, assassinated in 1979, claims that Catarina [Macass church] is the new Calvary / on its lands a cross is raised / together with the body of Father Macas / who died because he followed Jesus. A song called Father Rafael Palacios, for another murdered priest, includes the following lyrics: Like Christ they beat you with a ferocious rope / with insults they whipped you to silence your voice / You walked to the Calvary like Jesus walked . . . / the machine gun was your cross (El Pueblo Canta, n.d.: 542, 551). Although the locale and the weapons change, the meaning for believers remains the same. Not only do activists repeat Jesuss death, these rituals suggest, but Jesus himself continues dying in their struggles. Old and new sacrifices blend together, as do sacred and mundane histories. You are abandoned on the cross / massacred by the powerful / Today you also spill your blood / in the blood of our fallen, asserts the Misa Salvadorea (Salvadoran Mass) (El Pueblo Canta, n.d: 159). The dialectic between sacred and secular history flows in both directions. Just as contemporary believers enter into sacred history, divine events and characters irrupt into present events. When the powerful attack activists today, not only do they kill people like Jesus, but they crucify Jesus himself again. Thus popular rituals affirm the continuity of the struggle between good and evil: the battle for social justice in Central America today involves forces that were at work in the death of Jesus 2,000 years ago. This dialectical relationship between sacred and secular history reinforces the power and significance of each. Connections to Jesuss passion endowed political killings with a transcendent meaning and provided compelling justification for political opposition. Protest became a sacred struggle; abandoning the cause meant abandoning ones faith; holding firm in the face of danger

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guaranteed divine rewards. The most important reward is a future life, which in Central American narratives of martyrdom had little to do with individual bodily resurrection but rather focused on a collective rebirth through the creation of a better society. This interpretation served not only political but also psychological purposes. Studies of the effects of political violence have shown that victims with a clear political or religious interpretive framework and value system recover more quickly and with less lasting damage. Research in Chile, for example, found that people with wellarticulated political commitments recovered from imprisonment, torture, or the death of loved ones more rapidly and completely than their apolitical peers. Conversely, people without a political context suffered more when relatives were imprisoned or killed, and had the hardest time coming to emotional resolutions regarding the death or disappearance of the loved ones (Weinstein et al., 1987: 82, 188). Similarly, Terrence DesPres argued that a sense of political purpose helped concentration camp survivors to endure during World War II: Political consciousness and contact with others in the struggle against Nazism were necessary conditions of success; it was this that gave people a sense of purpose in life behind barbed wire and enabled them to hold out (DesPres, 1976: 121). Similar convictions helped many Salvadorans survive and continue struggling despite the brutality of the civil war. Even after over a decade of intense political violence, therefore, activists drew on frames of martyrdom to make sense of and use, politically, the murders of six prominent Jesuit priests in November 1989, in the wake of a major FMLN offensive. They were killed for the same reasons as Grande, Romero, and countless other victims of the Salvadoran military, activists asserted, and their deaths formed part of a continuous project leading toward the ultimate triumph of Gods cause. Even Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, who succeeded Romero, placed the killings of the Jesuits in this larger context. Asked who had killed the priests, Rivera answered, It was those who murdered Archbishop Romero and

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who are not satisfied with 70,000 dead (Sobrino, 1990: 30). Obviously, the same persons did not kill all the war victims. For Rivera and many other Salvadorans, however, the same agents of power ultimately caused their deaths. According to this narrative, even though the same forces continued attacking the true church, ultimately this church would triumph despite, or because of, the sacrifices of its best (most Christ-like) representatives. For example, laypeople from Jayaque, where Ignacio Martn-Bar, one of the Jesuits, had often celebrated Mass, wrote him a letter that asserted: People like you never last in this life. But we know very well that, with everything that has happened, the church will never give up. We are going to continue your example because God wanted it that way (Canton de Jayaque, 1990: 90). The inspiration to continue struggling had continuing political import, as the FMLNs Radio Venceremos underlined when it compared the dead Jesuits to a tough flower, the izote, that reproduces itself very quickly after being cut. The murdered priests, asserted the radio, are like the flower of the izote, stubbornly reluctant to die, stubbornly reluctant to stop existing, stubborn in its intent to continue living (Radio Venceremos, 1990: 51). The killing of the Jesuits sparked international outrage and helped push the Salvadoran government to negotiate with the FMLN, under United Nations sponsorship, in April 1990. After intense negotiations, an agreement was announced on December 31, 1991. Representatives of the guerrillas and the government signed the peace accords on January 16, 1992, and the cease-fire began on February 1. The war formally came to an end in December 1992, when the last guerrillas and targeted government soldiers entered civilian life.

MARTYRDOM AND SACRIFICE SINCE 1992 The peace accords sought not only to end the armed conflict, but to
structure a new El Salvador, to build what UNCESCO called a culture of peace. As the report of the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador

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proposed, the end of the war would be a transition from madness to hope (Betancur et al., 1993). Key to this process were the demilitarization of the FMLN and its incorporation as a legal political party. The accords also called for the purification of government forces, including the disbanding of several especially notorious units and the removal of over 100 officers associated with human rights violations. Some former combatants joined the National Civilian Police force while others returned to civilian life with the help of land-transfer program and educational opportunities. The restructuring of the institutions most overtly linked to the war took place within the context of longer-term restructuring of the economy, which has in general involved the decline of the agricultural export sector, increasing dependance on dollars from Salvadorans in the United States and elsewhere outside of El Salvador, privatization of state and public enterprises, deregulation of finance, and the fixing of currencys value to the US dollar, followed by the adoption of the US dollar as national currency (Segovia, 2002). With the decline of the agrarian sector, the wealthy moved their capital into other sectors, notably finance and transportation, while the rural poor become poorer, many leaving the countryside to work in Salvadoran cities (often as maids and security guards or in construction), in maquiladoras or foreign-owned factories, or leaving El Salvador altogether to seek work in the United States or, less often, Mexico, Canada, Europe, or Australia. The remittances sent home by Salvadorans residing abroad are a major source of income for many of those who remain at home, and possibly the largest single source of foreign income for the nation (World Bank, 2003). For many Salvadorans, both rural and urban, working- and middle-class, supportive of the FMLN and not, the democracy and peace promised by the end of the war is lived as a world of uncertainty, violence, and frustration (Hume, 2004). The war has been the measure against which postwar violence and suffering are registered; it remains a touchstone for personal memory for those who survived it (a rapidly

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diminishing part of the population, whose average age today is 21). One might imagine that when measured with reference to 12 years in which more than 75,000 people were killed; in which extrajudicial assasinations, torture, and disappearances were regular tactics of counterinsurgency; during which hundreds of thousands were displaced, the postwar period could only be understood as a massive improvement. This was certainly the hope of the United Nations mission that oversaw the settlement of the war, and was the sentiment of United Nations General Secretary Boutros Boutrous-Ghali, who declared in 1995 that El Salvador has taken giant strides away from a violent and closed society (UN, 1995: 7). Yet many Salvadorans who lived through the war feel that conditions in the present are actually worse than during the war. They force us to ask, as Ellen Moodie puts it, what kind of peace was agreed to (Moodie, 2006: 66). This is in large part attributable to a sense of frustration and disappointment among FMLN fighters and their supporters. The FMLN slogan in the weeks following the signing of the accords was we won the peace (ganamos la paz). While joy at the end of the fighting was widespread, for many the slogan implicitly suggested the rejoinder but we didnt win the war. For those who had sacrificed so much, for so long, in the name of the radical transformation of the national order, the negotiated settlement was not a clear victory. The sense that the revolutionary struggle lost its meaning appears to have spread in the years since the accords, in which conditions of poverty, suffering, frustration, and uncertainty continue to prevail for most Salvadorans (B. Peterson, 2006; Moodie, 2006). Irina Carlota Silber chronicles a sense of disillusionment and deception in the former FMLN-controlled territory of Chalatenango province, an area where both of us have lived and worked as well (Silber, 2000: 290). In conversations of daily life, Silber writes, when people visit their neighbors and kin, ride the bus, sit at local tiendas, or participate in events, it is not rare to hear discussions on how they have received nothing but sadness and loss from their wartime participation

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(Silber, 2000: 289). Silber cites an organizer and former activist who reasons that this sadness stems from the unsatisfactory resolution of the armed conflict: it is because folks did not join or support an armed struggle for a negotiated peace. They participated in order to overthrow institutionalized power and put in place a socialist project (Silber, 2000: 291). This sentiment was echoed by Amadeo Martnez, an indigenous rights and human rights activst and lawyer, and former FMLN organizer and clandestine militant. When the peace accords arrived, Martnez recalls, a lot of us didnt want that, because we knew that we werent fighting to institutionalize a party but for our objectives, which went beyond just getting to legalize the FMLN. Well then, after the peace accords many of us were left disillusioned. Because really this wasnt our objective (Martnez, 2002). Echoing Martnez, a campesino from Usulutn poses an ironic question: We shed blood all these years in order to buy land at market prices? (Wood, 2000: 209) In the rural villages and working-class barrios that sacrificed so much during the war, this sense of disappointment is acute. People struggled for 12 years for a different society, a peasant leader in Chalatenango province explains. The Peace Accords dont fulfill those yearnings. The settlement, one of his neighbors adds, fell short in relation to [our] dreams.3 That dreamthe utopian horizon for which so much blood was shedwas a new society, which would be politically democratic and free of repression. Most important, it would be egalitarian, it would protect the most vulnerable, and its members would be unified around their shared values. This solidarity, much more than free elections, judicial reform, or new political parties, define the vision for which thousands of Salvadorans fought and for which many died. As one former combatant put it, we were all going to be equal (todos bamos a ser iguales) (Rivera et al., 1995: 39; A. Peterson, 2005). The contrast between this utopian dream and the hard reality of postwar society shapes the way Salvadorans think about the sacrifice and death that preceded. Another former combatant expresses her disappointment in a postwar collection of testimonio:

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The war didnt bring me any profit, just losses. . . . I dont have anything. I dont have a way to pay for the land, so I cant work there; furthermore, I dont have a house, I mean I am frustrated. I expected that for what they had done they were going to give us something. That you wouldnt lack a house, where you would have water; and land where you could plant your corn. I feel frustrated. Because only the dead arent worried about anything (Rivera et al., 1995: 246). Frustration in the postwar period also reflects the reality of continuing experiences of violence, suffering, and death that remain commonplace in postwar El Salvador. In fact, the rate of violent deaths has been higher in the postwar period than it was during the conflict. The homicide rate has consistently been among the highest in the region. The overall rate of violent death in El Salvador grew during the first years after the peace accords to reach 130 deaths per 100,000 in 1996, matching the wartime average. This figure has declined significantly in the decade since, yet remains high. The homicide rate for 2006 was 55.3 per 100,000, the highest in Central America (see <http:// www.ocavi.com/>). Salvadorans associate violence today with criminality, often with gangs, and/or with happenstance, nature, or fate. The news is full of stories of robberies turned violent, car-jacking, kidnaping, murders of bus drivers who refuse to pay protection money, revenge killings, and traffic events, often involving pedestrians. Traffic deaths are higher in El Salvador than the average for low- and middle income countries, and death from malaria and dengue fever, from gastrointestinal and respiratory ailments, likewise are pervasive risks, especially for the nearly half of the population living in conditions of poverty. The sense that violence is an omnipresent and arbitrary threat, unmappable and so unavoidable, pervades everyday life. Unlike martyrs during the war, those who die in these conditions do not knowingly choose a path whose likely end is death.

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Liberation theology has continued to provide a critical analytical voice in these conditions. Priests and laypeople associated with the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana Jos Simen Caas, home to the six priests killed by the military in 1989, have produced a large body of written work on the meanings of martyrdom in times of peace and on what to do in times of neoliberal disenchantment (Carta a las Iglesias, 1995). The present is likened to the peace of Constantinople, a false peace of accommodation following the establishment of Christianity, in the fourth century CE, as the official religion of the Roman Empire and the loss, according to some, of the prophetic and communitarian character of the early church. The martyrs of the Salvadoran conflict remain fundamental figures in this work. They are invoked not simply as heroes of the past, but as bearers of utopian possibility who remain with the faithful, orienting their work in the present. [The] martyrs must be something always present in the Church. This is how the Church maintains its confrontation with the world. Because the fact is that the Satanic spirit of the world remains present in Latin America, remains present everywhere. The rich continue to prosper at the expense of the poor; the powerful continue to abuse their power; and the arrogant continue crushing the crucified of this Earth. One needs only to read the newspaper, to listen to the radio, to watch television. In El Salvador, to give only one example, there are more than 280,000 families without homes. What do we Christians do when faced with this situation? What do we do when confronted with so many human rights violations? (Castillo, 1994, 120). The answer, most often, is the same as it was during the war: to denounce injustice, to speak truth to power, to maintain a fundamental alliance with the poor and suffering. However, suffering today is often experienced as a by-product or side-effect, an accident, while unjust

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power is difficult to locate, a challenge heightened by the fact that, formally if superficially, Salvadorans exercise popular sovereignty in a democratic system. It is perhaps exacerbated as well by the radically refigured horizon of possibility for most poor Salvadorans. While essentially utopian possibilities animated the sacrifices made during the war, today the horizon is at once more concrete and mundane; it is the possibility of emigration to the United States, an option chosen by thousands of Salvadorans every year. During the years of government repression and war, martyrdom figured the sacrifice of ones life for the national good, for el pueblo, within a temporal frame oriented to a future of justice and peace for all. One of the most prevalent discourses of sacrifice since the wars end, that of the migrant, retains some of these features of martyrdom, but rearticulates them with a different vision of the good and a different temporal frame. Those who leave El Salvador to work in the United States without documents make large sacrifices to pay for the difficult and dangerous trip. Salvadorans currently pay between five and six thousand dollars to coyotes who provide transportation and other logistical help. This is an enormous sum for those who wish to migrate, who usually make the journey because the feel they do not have enough money in the first place. Typically, individuals pool funds from family members, often in the United States; they may spend their first years in the host country working to repay this loan. Migrants face risks on the road ranging from electrocution in freight yards and assault by gangs to deportation from Mexico or the United States and dehydration in the desert of the border region. Women and girls have been forced into prostitution, famously in the southern Mexican border town of Tapachula. Salvadorans have lost limbs riding freight trains and have been robbed and killed by gangs in Mexico, both Salvadoran and Mexican. The hazards of the journey are figured in narratives of sacrifice for the family, of the poor but resilient Salvadoran fighting to get ahead. A good example is a friend of the

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authors, now working in residential construction in the Midwest. This young man, who left two grade-school children with his parents, plans on spending two to three years in the United States to make enough money first, to pay back the loan for the coyote, and then to bankroll a small store or other business. Sacrifice here is organized around two keywords of neoliberal valuesfamily and enterprisein contrast to the liberation theology values of el pueblo and the Kingdom of God. Similarly, the image of Christ as a model for sacrifice, one who fought injustice and suffered with and as the people during the civil war has been displaced in narratives of sacrifice associated with migration by a more common and traditional understanding of Christ as the Good Shepherd. Indeed, Jess El Buen Pastor is the name of a shelter for injured Central American migrants in Tapachula, Mexico. The shelter has received financial support from foreign governments including the United States and Canada. It has been lauded by Mexican President Vicente Fox (who awarded the shelters founder the Mexican National Prize for Human Rights in 2004) and Maria Shriver, wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others (La Prensa Grfica, 2007; La Jornada, 2005). Jess El Buen Pastor provides a crucial service for Central American migrants, who urgently need concrete assistance on their journey north. However, the shelter embodies a vision of Christian charity that is basically apolitical, in sharp contrast to the image of Christ as martyr to injustice elaborated in Salvadoran liberation theology.

THE DEAD WALK WITH THEM During the early postwar years, popular discourses of martyrdom and
sacrifice focused on the heroic struggles of those who had made peace possible. Salvadoran revolutionaries and progressive Catholics strove to keep the martyrs sacrifices alive in various ways. Throughout the campus of the University of El Salvador, for example, murals refer to popular struggle. Most of these engage in forms of commemoration, and many employ the language of martyrdom directly. In a similar vein, the

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Universidad Centroamericana Jos Simeon Caas, home to the Jesuits killed in 1989 and a chapel dedicated to their memories, as well as the Monseor Romero Pastoral Center, continues to invoke martyrdom in its engagement with struggles for human rights and social justice. In both settings, heroes and martyrs continue to provide authority to progressive discourse and organizations, but in ways that differ significantly from earlier periods. Martyrdom in the postwar periods can be characterized most often as a discourse of memory, replacing the call to arms of the war years. Although this discourse of memory is evocative, its power to motivate activism and inspire hope has waned in the present conditions of insecurity and death in El Salvador. Salvadorans today confront, as Ellen Moodie puts it, an enormous chasm. A culture of loss (Moodie 2006: 66). This culture of lossthe experiential and interpretive spaces of deathis organized not with reference to locatable power, but is instead dispersed through social phenomena that are recorded as accidents, or as the results of individual conditions, subjective choices made in a calculus of costs and benefits, of risks. There is a distinction, in Foucaults terms, between the state that killsan act of sovereign power, authorized within a rationality of extending and confirming the power of the sovereign, of the stateand, on the other hand, a state that lets die (Foucault, 2007: 147). Thus the neoliberal state, always proclaiming its own retreat as a social good, is co-produced with a reframing of death as accidental, as natural, as peripheral to the project of politics, to neoliberal practices and strategies of rule. Here the liberationist Catholic notion of structural sinof social ills that are caused by clearly identifiable responsible agentsno longer holds (Gutirrez, 1973). Now suffering is no longer part of a collective struggle, their agents are no longer identifiable oppressors, and death is most often rendered as simply what is. In these circumstances, it becomes hard to orient toward the future or understand the present in terms of an historical trajectory. The problem for activists is to find a narrative can take up this death, make sense of it, and give it meaning.

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During the war, narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice ably performed these tasks (A. Peterson 1996, 1997). These concepts connected individuals to larger collectivities, tied specific events to larger historical frames, and identified particular agents of loss and suffering. In so doing, conceptions of martyrdom and sacrifice framed survivors relations with their dead, giving them meaning that made the losses more bearable. In the postwar situation, however, death and loss do not fall so clearly into the religiously and politically meaningful category of martyrdom. They are not part of a larger purpose-driven narrative, linking sacred and secular history. Rather, they appear as random and arbitrary events, without clear meaning or a message that Salvadoran activists can take up. Theirs is a utopia unarmed, in the words of the title of Jorge Castaedas book about the Latin American left in the 1990s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, and other events of the 1990s, according to Castaeda, it is hard for Latin American activists to conceive even the very notion of an overall alternative to the status quo (Castaeda,1994: 240-241).4 The outstanding lesson of Latin American history, however, should be that history is open: surprises and new things are indeed possible. And even the most disillusioned Salvadoran would be quick to insist that the martyrs help keep that history open; that even if the road ahead is not clear, the dead walk with them.
NOTES

1. As Jeffrey Gould notes, for left and right alike the deaths of the victims of the 1932 massacre were read as sacrifices to the creation of a racially unified, mestizo national subject as well, a reading that contemporary indigenous activists have worked to undermine (Gould, 2001). 2. These quotations come from a meeting attended by Anna Peterson in the parish of San Antonio Abad, San Salvador, in March 1990. 3. Interviews conducted by Anna Peterson, Guarjila, Chalatenango, El Salvador, January 5, 2002.

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4. Castaeda echoes British Prime Minister Margaret Thatchers famous declaration, after the Soviet Union disintegrated, that There is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism (Singer, 1999: 1). Another neoliberal hero, Francis Fukuyama, made a similar point: We cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better (Fukuyama, 1993: 46). Thatcher and Fukuyama, of course, evaluate this dearth of alternatives very differently than do Salvadoran peasants and workers.
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